David Salle: Tree of Life

Skarstedt inaugurates the newly reopened 79th Street gallery with Tree of Life, an exhibition of paintings from David Salle’s recent series.

Salle creates a Garden of Eden inspired by the visual vocabulary of mid-century cartoonist Peter Arno, using unnatural, high-key colors.

The orchestration of darks and lights has characterized Salle’s painting since the early 1980s while his innovations are the world of the printed page – the black, white and grey tones – as a subject and the open narrative telling many stories.

The title and the composition are meaningful because bisecting these theatrical vignettes is the tree itself, a metaphorical excavation of the bottom panels re-proposes the way we come to understand the present by looking at events of the past, a universal experience to which Salle has given literal visual form.